Earth’s nearest Supergiant red star Betelgeuse is on the verge of colliding into a “nearby” dust bar. Yet that will take a quite long time to happen a few thousand years.

It’s easy to see Betelgeuse, being one of the brightest stars in the sky. The red supergiant has 1000 times the diameter of our Sun and shining 100 000 times more brightly. Yet with great power comes shorter life-span. There are already specuations that Betelgeuse can go supernova at any moment within next million years

The European Space Agency‘s Herschel telescope has snapped a new image of Betelgeuse, which images just above and to the left of the Orion constellation in the visible night sky, showing an obstacle in the path of the brightly shining sun which is dust bar. Unlike which its still unclear what lies in the dust-bar. The new far-infrared view from Herschel shows how the star’s winds are crashing against the surrounding interstellar medium,creating a bow shock around Betelgeuse as it hurtles through the cosmos at 30km a second.

If the bar is a completely separate object, Betelgeuse’s outer arc will crash into it in just 5,000 years and the red star itself will follow, around 12,500 years later.

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